Unlike Darwin, Wallace's name passed into obscurity upon his death in 1913.

Alfred Russel Wallace may not be a name as well-known as Charles Darwin, but London's Natural History Museum is one of many institutions that believes it should be.

The reason why is simple: ask the average person in the street who discovered natural selection, they will say, "Darwin." In fact it was discovered by Darwin and Wallace—both scientists arrived at the conclusion independently in the 19th century, and in fact the original publication of the theory featured both of their names on the cover.

A hundred years after his death, the Natural History Museum (NHM) is hoping to address this and to make 2013 the year of Wallace. By doing so, it hopes to publicly reinstate the Victorian as the co-discoverer of one of the most important discoveries in the history of science.

The NHM has this week launched Wallace Letters Online, a website that showcases for the first time the correspondence Wallace had during his life and research. All surviving letters have been scanned and transcribed by museum volunteers and staff, and can be freely read and downloaded.

Who was Alfred Wallace?

One need only speak to George Beccaloni, NHM curator and director of the Wallace Correspondence Project, to discover why Wallace was such an important character in the scientific history books.

"When he died it's been said that he was the most famous person in the world," Beccaloni tells Wired.co.uk. "Every newspaper around the world ran obituaries about him and called him the last of the great Victorians.

"Wallace received a lot of credit in his lifetime for being the co-discoverer [of natural selection]. He was awarded every honor that it's possible for a biologist to receive in Britain, including the most prestigious honour of the Royal Society, the Copley Medal."

Problematically, natural selection was a distinctly controversial topic when it was proposed, and so after his death in 1913, Wallace's name devolved into relative obscurity.

"It was only when modern genetics and population ecology emerged in the late-1930s that people realised that natural selection was the key to evolution," says Beccaloni. "People got interested in the history of the subject and in where the idea came from and they looked back and saw Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' and didn't look any further."

Beccaloni is something of a Wallace evangelist, but he's not alone. He recently travelled with fellow Wallace fan Bill Bailey to Indonesia to film a two-part documentary for the BBC about the late scientist's discoveries. ("I went out as a sort of personal Wallace fact checker," says Beccaloni.) The documentary is set to be broadcast later this year.

For an insight into the life of Wallace, the Natural History Museum's Wallace Letters Online website is now open to the public.

26 Reader Comments

So, the historical lesson is that all else being equal, the scientist who is a better writer will be remembered, while the other will pass into obscurity.

After reading "A Brief History of Time", I can attest that I will remember Stephen Hawking longer than the authors of innumerable, dry, academic papers written in what can only be loosely described as the language of Shakespeare.

Good work from an excellent museum, in my opinion. They still have a 2-tonne marble statue of Charles Darwin in the entrance hall, though, and a Darwin Centre, so I guess Wallace loses out in the long run

After reading "A Brief History of Time", I can attest that I will remember Stephen Hawking longer than the authors of innumerable, dry, academic papers written in what can only be loosely described as the language of Shakespeare.

Well of course; there's a difference between popular scientific writing and the peer-reviewed literature.

I suspect that Hawking's primary publications make for a pretty arcane read.

Obviously this is subjective, but IMHO Wallace is just as good a writer as Darwin, but they had very different styles and approaches to making their arguments.

Wallace's " On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type" basically makes all the same observations and arguments as Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", but Darwin uses hundreds of pages of evidence and examples to illustrate and bolster his arguments, while Wallace just lays out the principles in sketch form.

My personal hypothesis is that Darwin was more feted than Wallace because Darwin was a prominent member of Victorian upperclass society and a bit of a traveling explorer rock star, while Wallace was from a hard scrabble poor upbringing and was in the field as a merchant rather than a scientist.

Wallace didn't devote as much of his work to natural selection as Darwin did, which is on reason why his stuff isn't read much by the general public. I remember learning about him in uni and being told that the actual work he's remembered for is not his work on natural selection, but his (apparently excellent) studies of plant phylogeny.

Quote: "My personal hypothesis is that Darwin was more feted than Wallace because Darwin was a prominent member of Victorian upperclass society and a bit of a traveling explorer rock star, while Wallace was from a hard scrabble poor upbringing and was in the field as a merchant rather than a scientist."

That's a good summary of the contrast. Wallace spent far more time in the field than Darwin, much of it in SE Asian jungles rather than on shipboard. And he supported his research by selling some of the insects he found to collectors in the UK. Darwin, on the other hand, spent much of his life on an English country estate and benefited from the fortune his wife had inherited. They were two very different men. Also, it seems to be true that the possibility that Wallace would publish his work is what motivated Darwin to finally go public with his views.

Those who'd like to know more about Wallace and in particular how his views differed from those of Darwin might want to read Michael Flannery's Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (2011).

Thank god it's been more than 95 years since he died, or the US government would be extraditing a lot of museum people for copyright violation. I heard a Canadian was going to post a copy of 1984 since it's in the public domain there, but it's not in the US until 2044, so he could be dragged to the US for trial according to existing precedents.

Great, now how about putting Mendeleev back into Mendeleev's periodic table of elements. I mean on the actual fing tables. Maybe that's sentimental but stuff like drives me crazy. At least the Russians do it.

Wallace didn't devote as much of his work to natural selection as Darwin did, which is on reason why his stuff isn't read much by the general public. I remember learning about him in uni and being told that the actual work he's remembered for is not his work on natural selection, but his (apparently excellent) studies of plant phylogeny.

After reading "A Brief History of Time", I can attest that I will remember Stephen Hawking longer than the authors of innumerable, dry, academic papers written in what can only be loosely described as the language of Shakespeare.

Well of course; there's a difference between popular scientific writing and the peer-reviewed literature.

I suspect that Hawking's primary publications make for a pretty arcane read.

If you want a pretty cool (though quite long) read, look at Penrose's _The_Road_to_Reality_. In it Penrose makes an overt jab at _A_Brief_History_of_Time_, saying that you can't really tell the tale in 200 pages and only one equation. So he wrote 1100+ pages with tons of equations. As a physicist, I found it far more informative. (Admittedly, though, I read every word of A Brief History of Time when I was a undergrad. I have yet to read half of The Road to Reality, even though I am now several years post doc.)

On topic: I agree with the general feeling that Wallace got the short end of the deal with regard to credit on natural selection. It's a different world today than it was then in many ways.

It makes you wonder how many men (and probably moreso women) are stuck in lives of menial chores and subsistence and don't get the opportunity to excercise their minds properly. How many Wallaces, Darwins or Einsteins have lived but never realised their full potential?

Wallace didn't devote as much of his work to natural selection as Darwin did, which is on reason why his stuff isn't read much by the general public. I remember learning about him in uni and being told that the actual work he's remembered for is not his work on natural selection, but his (apparently excellent) studies of plant phylogeny.

Darwin works are read much by the general public???

Among my friends and family, about half have read 'Origin', which puts it about on level with Jane Austen and Lewis Carrol, so from anecdotal evidence, I would say yes.

Of course if your idea of 'general public' is the Texas Education Board, then maybe not.

A sobering reminder of just how bluddy wrong, and for how long, 7.x billion people can be, once in a while!

If that's an unfair criticism of humanity, try this one instead:* Aristotle (384-322 BC - remember him?) wrote that heavier objects fall to earth faster than lighter ones. But he short-sightedly only compared feathers with rocks and got a certain result.* Galileo (1564-1642) proved him wrong in 1589 at the leaning tower of Pisa (you remember that one!).

Let's see: 1589 - -322 = 1911 years (at least; it uses the year of Aristotle's death as an approximation)

But now to the nitty-gritty, the bit that as a card-carrying human you'd rather not confront or contemplate...Even though Aristotle specifically wrote that anyone could perform an experiment to prove his statement, for nearly 2 millennia no child and no adult (I must repeat: Not a single one!) was ever documented to have picked up 2 differently sized rocks and dropped them at the same time from shoulder height to see if what happens matches "science".

Nearly. Two. Millennia. Is this registering with you? *

My point is: just in case anyone thought that we, as a thinking species, had it all sewn up, we sure do not. We have progressed culturally and technologically from Galileo's time, but are still the same species with very nearly the same genes as those recent morons (or would you rail at the suggestion that they they were morons?!).

I guess that the good news is, if any, that while the whole world can be completely and "inexcusably" wrong about an utterly obvious thing for a lot of centuries in a row, at least the whole world can ALSO be convinced to smarten up once in a while too. So let's keep trying to rid the world of religious influence, we may very well prevail in that effort, though perhaps only if we can also ensure Climate Change Deniers don't win like Aristotle won, FIRST! One fight at a time. Climate change, THEN religion, would be my agenda. Start small!

Given the amount of human inventions and constructions in that time period that heavily relied on gravity, I think it's more likely that this is a case of thousands and thousands of cases of that level of curiosity and experimentation not being documented, or of the documentation not surviving.

As a simple example, it would probably be impossible to construct and accurately operate a Trebuchet, or any siege weapon in fact, without a better understanding of gravity than Aristotle demonstrated. The fact that numerous different civilizations developed a wide variety of successful siege weapons in this time is an indication that several people before Galileo had made similar observations about gravity, they just didn't have the luck to have their discover widely circulated and immortalized.

It makes you wonder how many men (and probably moreso women) are stuck in lives of menial chores and subsistence and don't get the opportunity to excercise their minds properly. How many Wallaces, Darwins or Einsteins have lived but never realised their full potential?

Ah, publish or perish. There is a lot of evidence Darwin's friends had been urging him to publish for ages, but knowing how conterviersial it was and having a very religious wife he dallied. Then he received coorespondence from Wallace which showed him how close he was to being 'scooped', which drove him to finish his famous (infamous many at the time and since believed) work On the Origin of Species.

I used to think Wallace was not given his due in this matter, until I realized that if Darwin had published his ideas as he developed them, Wallace would not have had a chance to independently develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. If that had happened, he would be virtually unknown today.

After reading "A Brief History of Time", I can attest that I will remember Stephen Hawking longer than the authors of innumerable, dry, academic papers written in what can only be loosely described as the language of Shakespeare.

Well of course; there's a difference between popular scientific writing and the peer-reviewed literature.

I suspect that Hawking's primary publications make for a pretty arcane read.

If you want a pretty cool (though quite long) read, look at Penrose's _The_Road_to_Reality_. In it Penrose makes an overt jab at _A_Brief_History_of_Time_, saying that you can't really tell the tale in 200 pages and only one equation. So he wrote 1100+ pages with tons of equations. As a physicist, I found it far more informative. (Admittedly, though, I read every word of A Brief History of Time when I was a undergrad. I have yet to read half of The Road to Reality, even though I am now several years post doc.)

On topic: I agree with the general feeling that Wallace got the short end of the deal with regard to credit on natural selection. It's a different world today than it was then in many ways.

All agreed and just to reiterate - read Penrose, clearer and more useful than Hawking.

Quote: "My personal hypothesis is that Darwin was more feted than Wallace because Darwin was a prominent member of Victorian upperclass society and a bit of a traveling explorer rock star, while Wallace was from a hard scrabble poor upbringing and was in the field as a merchant rather than a scientist."

That's a good summary of the contrast. Wallace spent far more time in the field than Darwin, much of it in SE Asian jungles rather than on shipboard. And he supported his research by selling some of the insects he found to collectors in the UK. Darwin, on the other hand, spent much of his life on an English country estate and benefited from the fortune his wife had inherited. They were two very different men. Also, it seems to be true that the possibility that Wallace would publish his work is what motivated Darwin to finally go public with his views.

Those who'd like to know more about Wallace and in particular how his views differed from those of Darwin might want to read Michael Flannery's Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (2011).

The quote is bang on my (colonial?) friend. Victorian English society riven with class and privilege which extends to today. If you know Lord Arbuthnot you have far far more chance of being remembered than if you know Bill the stoker. Examples run throughout our history. Alan Turing is a prime example – had he been posh he would have lived. If Shakespeare had written ‘first kill the aristocrats’ instead of ‘first kill all the lawyers’ he would have been on to something – and dead!